Time-of-day affects prospective memory differently in younger and older adults

ABSTRACT

The goal of this study was to investigate the impact of circadian arousal on prospective memory performance as a function of age. We tested a younger (18–34 years) and an older group (56–95 years) of participants on- and off-peak with regard to their circadian arousal patterns in a computer-based laboratory experiment. For the prospective memory task, participants had to press a particular key whenever specific target words appeared in an ongoing concreteness-judgment task. The results showed that prospective memory performance was better on- than off-peak in younger but not older participants. Younger participants consistently outperformed older participants in all conditions. We conclude that prospective remembering underlies time-of-day effects which most likely reflect controlled processes.

KEYWORDS:

• Intention memory
• monitoring
• spontaneous retrieval
• time-of-day
• circadian arousal
• aging

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. More details on this measure can be found in Section 2.2 and Section 2.4 of this article.

2. This was confirmed for the first 80 participants under the assumption that this specific result would not change for the remaining participants.

Additional information

Funding

This work has been partly supported by a grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation [PZ00P1_154954] to N. Rothen.